The Sea Hates a Coward (8 page)

A cloud of grey water was birthed from a sprawling wound in its belly, spilling indistinct clouds of innard; spawning a boil of lampreys, hagfish, saw-suckers and carrion skate. The bay’s gates were sliding slowly shut, but the hoary slick of filth flowed through their lattice, fountaining over the lip of the lagoon and into the currents beyond.

It had been smelled.

As the truck sped along the row of saw-cranes, Wrack watched transfixed as a claw the colour of green milk rose from the measureless sea beyond the bay, studded with wicked barbs, and hooked itself roughly over the closing sea-gate. For a moment, he could have sworn the entire vessel dipped inches as the ghastly thing tugged on its edge, before the metal sagged like tissue and tore away. Even as the gate collapsed, a second limb unfolded from the roiling sea, its tip groping over the edge of the bay and catching in the trailing guts of the Bahamut.

Over the crashing hiss of pouring water, whip-cracks popped from the lagoon as the cables anchoring the gigafauna in place stretched and snapped. The middle of the Bahamut was drawn out towards open water by the claw, as an armoured head rose at the edge of the abyss in sheets of rushing green water.

It was part mantis shrimp, part dragonfly nymph, part mountainside, part god; an edifice of compound eye and scissoring mouthparts. Something too weird to exist beyond rambling footnotes, even in the books of his youth. One of the ET clade.

The ETs were some of the least understood, the most feared, and the most profitable of Ocean’s fauna. Some held they had been the original inhabitants of this endless sea; others, that their ancestors had been carried here as larvae in ballast tanks, long years ago when the sky had been a way in and out of the world. Nobody even knew if they could breed here.

Either way, they were rare, and huge, and worth ten times their weight in meat. Despite being inedible, their strange aromatics, weird compounds, their cellular metabolism based on radioactive decay, made them prizes beyond measure. And they were bastard hard to kill.

As soon as the knotted immensity of the ET’s head broke water, the guns opened fire. From the corners of the steel lagoon clustered turrets blazed into life, dozens of muzzle flashes drowning the weak morning light in their actinic rage. An instant later the air filled with the hyperkinetic stutter of miniguns, the arrhythmic crump of AP shells, and the staccato thud of munitions raining into yard-thick chitin-analogue.

With a titanic screech that seemed to shiver the deep steel of the deck, the ET reared a full fifty yards into the air, twisting its segmented tower of a body even as its surface was drilled into clouds of splinters, before hurling itself sideways into the sea. Gouts of water leapt up from its vanishing, a swell of oil-souped brine washing over the walls of the lagoon, and then all was silent but for the slapping of the bullied water.

Then, pandemonium.

A new siren, deep and aggressive, blasted from horns all around Dakuvanga’s base. Boats were being hauled from their brackets by a swaying forest of cranes, while trucks carrying munitions, fuel and endless piles of the flailing dead swarmed to the muster points beside the lagoon.

“
Code Three! Code Three!
” screamed a static-blasted voice from the cab of the truck. “
It’s holed and surface-bound; fleet C, all boats to pursuit, all boats!
”

The predator’s howl came again, and Wrack saw the sea beyond the
Tavuto
break in the roll of a mountainous carapace.

“
There she blows!
” came the shout from the radio, a distorted cry of ecstasy, and Wrack found himself tumbling from the truck in a mound of disgorged bodies.

CHAPTER NINE

H
E WAS HERDED
down a steel ramp and into darkness, one of a numberless press of zombies being funneled below decks and into thundering industry of the
Tavuto
’s underworld. Down they went through channels and conduits, merging with other streams of zombies and sorted at junctions by hard-handed overseers. Chains rattled on pulleys, hammers clinked in the depths, and radio chatter echoed along the low ceilings like the rustle of bat wings.

There was no way to turn around in the press, nor to see more than a few feet past the jostling heads of other cadavers. For all he knew, Mouana and the others could be an arm’s reach away, or gone entirely. They had become a sort of liquid, like the slurry of plankton caught against a whale’s baleen in the straining of its jaws.

A rhythmic thunder came from his right, as if boulders were rolling through iron tubes somewhere below; as the corridor’s side opened up into a row of columns, he saw red-ochre boats slide past on steel rails, lighting their own passage with slews of sparks. They cannoned past and round a bend, disappearing in rings of fire on the tunnel walls.

To his left, monsters were being made. Ancient-looking zombies, their flesh patched with plastic and bursting with cables and pipes, stood on hydraulic legs as terrible armatures were lowered onto them from above. Teams of overseers fell upon them as the jointed rigs came down, riveting hinges shut and hammering wingnuts into place.

In the light from a welding torch, one of the lumpen constructs looked right at Wrack—or right through him. The skin of its face was blasted, leathery, as if it had been cooked, and its eyes were sightless as stones. A cluster of lenses jutting from its shoulder glinted, reflecting a shower of sparks as a hulking steel pincer was grafted to its side, and Wrack wondered what it saw.

Then the monster rocked back on its feet, the overseers stepping away as it flexed its construction site of a torso, and turned away to follow its cohort into the dark. Wrack was jostled past the assembly platform into a corridor barely higher than his head, and then into a long room packed wall-to-wall with corpses. Between the railings along the walls and the cluster of machinery in the middle, all was flesh. Wrack was just wondering why the crowd had stopped moving, when a heavy door slammed shut behind him.

The darkness was crushing, ringing with the muffled clamour of the hammers and the rails outside. The floor shuddered. Wrack realised he was holding a breath he could not breathe. And then, with a ratcheting crack, the floor dropped six feet all at once.

Before he could register what was going on, there was a groan of steel, and the entire room pivoted forwards sickly. Wrack fell against the zombie ahead of him, and was trying to free his trapped arm when gravity seemed to collapse entirely. The enclosed space exploded with the hiss of steel on steel and shuddered madly: cold, briny air blasted against his face and the world shot forwards, downwards, at a reckless incline.

Wrack was smashed back into the bodies behind him, the acceleration shoving the air from his lungs, and the roof, in the dim, returning light, thundered past in a blur. Then daylight exploded into his face, followed instantaneously by a wall of salt water, and the boat’s engines growled into life.

They were in some kind of pinnace, an iron trough full of zombies, with a spluttering engine at the back and a block of generators amidships. Blinking sore eyes against the light, Wrack looked around and saw more boats hitting the water, surging ahead and carving white valleys in the grey. Through the wall of black smoke kicked out behind them by the engine, the
Tavuto
rose like an iron cliff, its side pitted with chutes from which more vessels shot and slapped against the waves.

The engine shifted pitch and the pinnace lurched forward, the overseer in his chair at the bow gunning the handlebars like a dirt biker. The flat bottom of the craft skimmed and slapped over the swells, causing its cargo to bounce on their feet, heads nodding as if captivated by music. As they reached full speed, there was an almighty crash, and a grey shape filled the world to their left, heralded by walls of displaced water.

For a moment Wrack thought part of the
Tavuto
’s side had fallen away, plunging into Ocean like a calving iceberg, before he recognised the new arrival as another launch, a ship in its own right, dwarfing the rest of the swarm like a pike cutting through a shoal of minnows.

The behemoth craft surged forward, making the sea rear up around them, and the pinnace’s pilot leaned left hard to bring them swerving close in alongside it. As they blasted along its flank, Wrack saw it was armoured like a siege tank, its hull buttressed with rows of squat cylinders and braced with steel ribs.

Up where the hull gave way to the deck, the edge of the ship bristled with turrets, in which were fixed the mechanised zombies he had seen being assembled in the mothership’s bowels. They faced the spray with sightless eyes and blank snarls, withered bodies sagging at the heart of industrial weaponry. Ahead of them, the boat’s prow was emblazoned with the flaking, crude image of snarling teeth, and its name,
Akhlut
, scrawled like a curse in white stencilled letters.

As it reached full speed, the killship sounded its horn, a terrible blast that raced ahead of it like a black wave, and seemed to haunt the silence it left behind. Fleetingly, against his every wish, and despite the endless grey that stretched out in every direction around the hunting fleet, Wrack felt like part of something lethal.

As the racing armada gathered around the
Akhlut
, he tried to count their number—there must have been more than thirty boats in all. Some were sleek and long, sparsely crewed and bristling with harpoons, launchers and other weaponry. Others, like the craft in which Wrack was crammed, were crude barges, built around bulky electrical machinery and packed to the gunwales with restless zombies. At the head of the pack, a hundred yards ahead of the
Akhlut
, a catamaran with a deck enclosed in armoured blisters cut through the water with the urgency of a shark on a wound-scent.

Before long, the water around them became marbled with oily white swirls—the blood of the ET. White, translucent bodies thrashed weakly in the slick; whether they were scavengers, or strange parasites leaked from the shell of the alien devil, Wrack had no idea.

The trail waxed and waned, but they kept on it; the chase became a marathon. Even mortally wounded, it seemed, the ET could keep up a monstrous speed.
Tavuto
shrank to a stain on the horizon, and sank from sight. The open Ocean stretched: borderless, bereft of detail in every direction, and empty.

Once, the onrushing flotilla disturbed a swarm of Jenny Hanivers; they came bursting from the water in tan arcs, demon tails flapping and gnarled wings beating uselessly at the air. Later, their wakes were chased by shadows for a time, weaving beneath the white like hungry phantoms, always out of sight. Then there was nothing; just the clouds above, the grey plain of water below, and the stripe of chemical leakage promising prey.

Wrack passed the time by staring at the faces of his fellow passengers, trying to guess at their former lives by their scars, the fragments of their clothes, the washed-out tattoos on their waterlogged skin. To his right, a woman with a broken jaw and a ring-puckered ear stared blankly ahead with her smashed mouth yawning. Had she been a student, or the septuagenarian matriarch of a factory clan? With the skin of her arms hanging in withered bunches from wasted muscles, her skin clumped in folds, death had muddled decades.

Beyond her, a man with the bricklike features of a classic pub bruiser stood, a string of black drool looping from his lip, as he gazed absently at the filth sloshing around their feet. Ahead of him, a zombie whose sore-pocked head had shed all but a few clumps of greying hair swayed, oblivious to the fact its arm ended just past the shoulder, in a roughly-bandaged and rapidly unravelling mess.

It was then that Wrack spotted Mouana’s commander, wedged in between the one-armed zombie and a block of machinery, his head turned to look out at the sea. Wrack went to shout his name, but it was as if something had clotted in the misfiring channels of his brain; he had forgotten it, there was only a maddening greyness in its place.

He cried out anyway, desperately hoping the word would come to him, but all it did was set the other zombies off in one of their dreadful concatenations of moaning. Trying to shoulder his way through the crowded deck, he found their faces turning towards him, mute confusion etched on their brows as they shouted wordlessly and shoved back. For every foot he managed to squeeze through the press, he seemed to be pushed back eighteen inches by their flailing.

Wrack was on the brink of laying in with his fists, when the mortars began firing.

Dull thuds rang out from the
Akhlut
, and were echoed after a moment by popping detonations from a nearby weapons pinnace. Heavy projectiles tumbled through the leaden sky in low arcs, before smacking into the water ahead in plopping plumes of brine. A second volley fired, and then the detonations began. They were felt rather than heard, battering concussions that felt as if the boat was being smacked against from beneath, made Wrack think at first they were being swatted at by the ET. Depth charges. The hunt had begun.